," he answered, "and not
have trusted my child and myself among strangers in hotels."

"Ah, indeed? And you would have condemned your poor little daughter
to solitude? You would have seen her pining for the company of other
children, and would have had no mercy on her? I wonder what you would
have done when Captain Bennydeck paid us a visit at the seaside? He was
introduced to Mrs. Norman, and to Mrs. Norman's little girl, and we
were all charmed with him. When he and I happened to be left together
he naturally wondered, after having seen the beautiful wife, where the
lucky husband might be. If he had asked you about Mr. Norman, how would
you have answered him?"

"I should have told the truth."

"You would have said there was no Mr. Norman?"

"Yes."

"Exactly what I did! And the Captain of course concluded (after having
been introduced to Kitty) that Mrs. Norman was a widow. If I had set him
right, what would have become of my daughter's reputation? If I had told
the truth at this hotel, when everybody wanted to know what Mrs. Norman,
that handsome lady, was--what would the consequences have been to
Catherine and her little girl? No! no! I have made the best of a
miserable situation; I have consulted the tranquillity of a cruelly
injured woman and an innocent child--with this inevitable result; I have
been obliged to treat your brother like a character in a novel. I have
ship-wrecked Herbert as the shortest way of answering inconvenient
questions. Vessel found bottom upward in the middle of the Atlantic, and
everybody on board drowned, of course. Worse stories have been printed;
I do assure you, worse stories have been printed."

Randal decided on leaving her. "Have you done all this with Catherine's
consent?" he asked as he got up from his chair.

"Catherine submits to circumstances, like a sensible woman."

"Does she submit to your telling Kitty that her father is dead?"

For the first time Mrs. Presty became serious.

"Wait a minute," she answered. "Before I consented to answer the child's
inquiries, I came to an understanding with her mother. I said, 'Will you
let Kitty see her father again?'"

The very question which Randal had promised to ask in his brother's
interests! "And how did Catherine answer you?" he inquired.

"Honestly. She said: 'I daren't!' After that, I had her mother's
authority for telling Kitty that she would never see her father again.
She asked directly if her father was dead--"